Boards not played
The White Book is clear that if a director cancels the final round, then the boards not played should be scored as “not played”.
Does this also apply if, say, the last two boards of a three board round are not played - with just the unplayed boards scored as “not played”?
Are there any other consideration?
Comments
I can't see any difference in principle.
Boards which are cancelled because the director has effectively rewritten the movement become boards that are not scheduled to be played and should have no score. This includes where the director cancels the last round at all tables, or where the director cancels the last board at all tables in each of the last
Nrounds.I agree with this; the main consideration for "not played" is if there's a last-minute change to the movement. If the Director decides "OK, we aren't going to play the last round", that's effectively the same as choosing a movement in which not all the rounds are played, so you obviously don't score the cancelled rounds at all. In most scoring software, entering the rounds as "not played" is the most convenient way to get the correct scores for the new movement (because trying to retroactively change the movement is much harder).
If the director is cancelling a fraction of boards in a round, the main consideration here would be as to whether the cancellation is symmetrical; if you're cancelling one board at every table, then you're effectively generating a new movement on the fly (it's unbalanced, but not as unbalanced as the truncated movement where you cancel the whole round, and thus definitely makes sense as a movement). So you can enter the boards as "not played" and end up with a valid score for your created movement.
On the other hand, if some boards are cancelled at some tables, but not at others, you can't now call that part of the movement (as the movement has to be symmetrical). So the cancelled boards have to be replaced by an artificial assigned score. (The normal reason for such a cancellation would be as a consequence of slow play, in which case the assigned score will depend on which partnerships caused the play to go slowly.)
There must some uniformity to the cancelling boards, for the cancelled boards to count as not-played.
If there is a fire alarm evacuation and 15 minutes is lost from the evening, the TD might find (during the last round) that there may not be time to play the boards. If the instruction is "don't start the last board if you have not already done so", then assuming some "last" boards have been started, the boards that cannot be played should be scored 60/60 (unless someone at the table was responsible for setting off the fire alarm :))
Thanks for the comments.
However, I’m not sure of what is meant by symmetry. If there are relay boards, so some are not affected by a decision not to play a full round, does that destroy the symmetry, so needing assigned scores on all the unplayed boards?
From the comments, it sounds as though it is better to specify “don’t play the last board of the round” rather than “don’t start the last board if you have not already done so” to avoid the controversial 60/60 award.
Or, better still, walk round the tables and remove the last board.
Relay boards don't matter: the important thing is that every pair plays the same number of boards. (Unless playing a 2-winner Mitchell movement it is almost impossible to get perfect competition between all pairs, but we do what we can to get close to it.)
The 60/60 award isn't really controversial. Some players have been denied the opportunity to earn a good score through no fault of their own - so, since we tend to be generous to non-offending pairs, we give them an above average score. No one loses since if their score is over 60% then that score is applied.